A Sampling Of Editorial Opinion

A Sampling of Editorial Opinion

Virginians need to understand one thing about the crisis with the state's mentally ill: The Commonwealth could spend every dime on that population and it would not solve all its problems.

So Gov. Gilmore's recent proposal to spend $42 million more to improve services for the mentally ill will win him friends among providers and with the Justice Department, but that is likely to be of little real help.

The reason is that the crisis is driven largely by ideology. The Justice Department would like to see every state mental hospital closed. Its staffers prefer to see helpless people on the streets, exercising their civil liberties, rather than cared for in institutions where their freedom is restricted. So Justice continually raises the bar on what qualifies as adequate treatment, hoping to make institutionalized care unaffordable for most states.

The ploy is succeeding. Consider that the staff-patient ratio already is 2 to 1 in Virginia's state mental hospitals, yet the governor's commissioned Hammond Report recommends hiring still more staff. It is difficult to imagine any purpose that will serve, other than perhaps placating the feds.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

TRADE WAR IS NO JOKE

The "banana wars" are an irresistible temptation to jokesters, but the principle at stake is not so risible. The United States has threatened to impose a 100 percent import duty on certain Italian cheeses, cashmere sweaters and 14 other products from 13 European Union countries unless they open their markets to Dole and Chiquita bananas, grown in Central America for U.S.-owned companies.

One retaliation could lead to another, igniting a real trade war between the United States and the EU that could jeopardize two-way trade exceeding $400 billion a year.

The battle over bananas, now six years old, results from EU trade policies that favor imports from former European colonies in the Caribbean and Africa, precisely the kind of protectionism that Carl H. Lindner, a controlling shareholder in Chiquita Brands International and a political heavyweight in Washington, cannot stand. He filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization, arguing that the policy discriminates against U.S. companies; last year the WTO agreed.

The issue springs from the EU's complex system of quotas, a slightly disguised form of protectionism that offends the principles of free trade. The WTO was founded precisely to solve these types of conflicts and has a mechanism for doing so. But it takes good sense, good will and compromise. Both sides should dampen their pride and return to the WTO forum.

The Los Angeles Times

CRITICS MUST SPEAK OUT

China is nearing its 50th anniversary as a communist state. While it has shed some of the vile and self-defeating practices excused by Marxist ideology as necessary for some future good, it continues in other ways to be a crude dictatorship unworthy of the respect of anyone holding to humane ideals.

Lately, the regime has been sentencing democratic dissidents to outrageous terms in prison for so-called crimes that amount to little more than expressing a point of view. One man will reportedly serve 10 years for nothing more than talking to a reporter for Radio Free Asia about farmers upset with their lot in southern China.

To some, it's bad manners even to mention this thuggery. To us, it's akin to complicity for people of good will to keep their mouths shut.

This sort of grotesque repression is not required because China is relatively poor or its stability somehow threatened. It's the consequence of a group of politicians clinging to power for all their worth and opposed to any change they themselves did not design. Considering the very real possibility that China may emerge as a force to be reckoned with throughout the world over the next century, it becomes doubly important for critics to speak out.

Scripps Howard News Service

DO FANS STILL CARE?

Did anyone - except maybe the executives at NBC television - notice that there wasn't a National Basketball Association game on television Christmas? Neither did we. (And to be truthful, we've always wondered in the past why those players weren't home with their families on Christmas.)

It begins to look as if the players will have plenty of quality time to give to their families in the months ahead, on Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Memorial Day - they're usually finished by Independence Day, aren't they?

Commissioner David Stern told the players last week that if there's no settlement of the current labor dispute by Jan. 7, the entire NBA season will be canceled. This, in case you've forgotten or never cared, is that contest of wills between two sets of millionaires over how to split up $2 billion.

Stern may want to mention that that pot probably will be a bit smaller when the two sides finally get together, because a good many fans have already canceled out the NBA.